There's a particular kind of book that travels well. Not too long, but not slight. The kind you can read at a roadside diner in twenty-minute stretches and still feel like you're getting somewhere.
These are five we keep coming back to.
Travels with Charley — John Steinbeck. 1962. An aging novelist drives across America with his standard poodle, looking for the country he used to know. It's about the road, but really it's about the slow disappearance of attention. The truck he traveled in is parked at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. Worth the detour.
The White Album — Joan Didion. 1979. Essays from a California that was already ending while she was writing about it. Her sentences are the cleanest in American writing. No one has matched them since.
The Lost Continent — Bill Bryson. 1989. Funnier than it has any right to be. The whole thing is about going home and finding everything smaller than you remembered, which is what driving long distances does to a person.
Blue Highways — William Least Heat-Moon. 1982. He drove the back roads of America in a van called Ghost Dancing after his marriage ended. The book that came out of it is one of the great accidental American documents.
The Book of Tea — Kakuzo Okakura. 1906. A small Japanese book about the philosophy of attention, written for English readers more than a century ago. Still the clearest thing ever written on why slowness matters.
Take one. Drive somewhere. Read it slowly.
— Sapere Aude